Section 15

15. The further question, therefore, is raised whether
boundlessness and indetermination are things lodging in something
other than themselves as a sort of attribute and whether
Privation [or
Negation of quality] is also an attribute residing in some separate
substratum.

Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is outside of
boundlessness: these bestow bound and settlement and order in
general upon all else: neither anything that has been brought under
order nor any Order-Absolute is needed to bring them under order.
The thing that has to be brought under order [e.g., Matter] is other
than the Ordering Principle which is Limit and Definiteness and
Reason-Principle. Therefore, necessarily, the thing to be brought
under order and to definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking
delimitation.

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order- like all that
shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same
principle- therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not
merely the recipient of a nonessential quality of Indefiniteness
entering as an attribute.

For, first, any attribute to any subject must be a
Reason-Principle; and Indefiniteness is not a Reason-Principle.

Secondly, what must a thing be to take Indefiniteness as an
attribute? Obviously it must, beforehand, be either Definiteness or
a defined thing. But Matter is neither.

Then again Indefiniteness entering as an attribute into the
definite must cease to be indefinite: but Indefiniteness has not
entered as an attribute into Matter: that is, Matter is essentially
Indefiniteness.

The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the Indefinite,
[the undelimited]; it must be a thing generated by the undefined
nature, the illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One
illimitableness, however, not possessing native existence There but
engendered by The One.

But how can Matter be common to both spheres, be here and be
There?

Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.

But what difference can there be between phase and phase of
Indefiniteness?

The difference of archetype and image.

So that Matter here [as only an image of Indefiniteness] would
be less indefinite?

On the contrary, more indefinite as an Image-thing remote from
true being. Indefiniteness is the greater in the less ordered
object; the less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate
in the Intellectual Realm, where there is truer being, might
almost be
called merely an Image of Indefiniteness: in this lower Sphere where
there is less Being, where there is a refusal of the
Authentic, and an
adoption of the Image-Kind, Indefiniteness is more authentically
indefinite.

But this argument seems to make no difference between the
indefinite object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none?

In any object in which Reason and Matter co-exist we distinguish
between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate subject: but where
Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say
right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not
present; for it is a Reason-Principle and could not lodge in the
indeterminate object without at once annulling the indeterminateness.

Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its
natural opposition to Reason-Principle. Reason is Reason and nothing
else; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is
Indeterminateness and nothing else.